"The more you feed an appetite, the more it takes to satisfy it."
Ben Franklin
If you always give in to the whims of a child, you can make him happy temporarily.
But eventually he’ll begin to want even more. With every concession, his desire to
be indulged will increase and eventually he will become insistent. Through our own
indulgence, laziness, or fear of confronting, he gets spoiled and becomes a little tyrant.
Eventually, the spoiled child won't take no for an answer.
The same is true of giving in to the whims of our impulses and emotions. Any emotion
that is indulged too much will grow to be an internal tyrant, or "monster
emotion" that
will push us around just to get their own way.
It's a matter of degree. The more we indulge it, the more one part will dominate our
other values. If it reaches a stage of causing us us to do things that we don't want to
do,
it's become a self-perpetuating monster emotion. No matter how much we give in to it,
it is never enough to make the desire go away because of the vicious circle that each time
that we feed it, the appetite grows until it becomes self-perpetuating.
That stirs us our insecurities, which then act up to get us to pay attention to our
weakness.
Then we get scissored between our indulgences that push us around to get their own way,
and our insecurities which sabotage us to get us to wake up and do something about the
area where we need to grow stronger. And if we don't do anything this just
keeps getting
worse and worse.